1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the management of media content. More particularly, the present invention relates to computer mediated selection of media content.
2. Background Art
The search for web content is now both easier, and yet more challenging for consumers than ever before. The search for web content is made easier by the vast and ever growing body of content available online. Whether a consumer seeks music, television programming, videos, or movies, for example, they are all out there in digital multimedia presentation form, just waiting to be accessed. At the same time, however, the search for web content has become more challenging in the sense that accessing particularly desirable content may be more difficult because of the plethora of alternatives competing for the consumer's attention. In effect, the clamorous availability of so much content so easily obtained, may serve as a significant distraction, and may make it that much more unlikely that the consumer will successfully identify and locate content of genuine interest to them.
For the consumer, identifying and locating content of real interest from amid the much greater body of similarly available content that may be more distracting than satisfying, can be a time consuming and frustrating experience. The active efforts required in order to differentiate among alternative content items to distinguish those presentations holding genuine interest for the consumer, may undermine the pleasure otherwise obtainable from a more seamless and immediate access to those presentations. Consequently, the wealth of desirable content available to the consumer, in principle, may be rendered far less enjoyable than it might otherwise be, in fact, by being obscured and made less accessible due to its own superabundance.
For example, consider the case of a consumer seeking to access a digital multimedia presentation corresponding to desirable television programming, online. A conventional approach to providing the digital multimedia presentation utilizes standard computer based information management tools to assist the consumer in identifying the desired presentation from a library of available content items. According to that approach, the consumer might be required to sort through the available content items, categorized according to genre, subject matter, or other criteria, to locate a particular desired presentation. This approach provides the consumer with some ability to discriminate among available content items according to broad themes, but provides a relatively rudimentary means for discovering the specific presentation of genuine interest. That is to say, one significant disadvantage of this conventional approach is that unless the search strategy employed by the consumer is well thought out and targeted, the consumer may be presented with a multitude of content items to evaluate, many of which may be of only marginal relevance to the consumer's focal interest.
Another significant disadvantage of the conventional approach flows from the iterative nature of the search process. Because a typical consumer may not be a particularly sophisticated searcher, identification of the desired presentation often requires that a search be refined in several stages, before a substantial number of less desirable content items are winnowed out. However, conventional user interfaces provided to assist in content management offer little in the way of navigational cueing, to assist the consumer in recognizing their present location on a search path through the contents of the presentation library. As a result, a consumer may become disoriented just as their search becomes sufficiently well defined to close in on the subset of presentations really of interest to them, and may experience unnecessary difficulty in isolating the most desirable presentations as a result.
Accordingly, there is a need to overcome the drawbacks and deficiencies in the art by presenting a solution for providing digital multimedia presentations that organizes and displays available web content so as to enable a consumer to engage and evaluate that content in an intuitive way, thereby facilitating identification of a presentation that is of genuine interest to the consumer.